Q: Take the common abbreviation for a major American city. Insert it inside an airport code for that city. And you'll name a flower. What flower is it?Perhaps it is a one-letter abbreviation?
A: Chicago (CHI) + O'Hare (ORD) = ORCHID
I guess it can be considered a word that describes the item.Q: Name something grown in a garden. Change the second letter, and double the third letter, to get an adjective that describes this thing. What is it?
A: RADISH --> REDDISH
Q: Think of two famous singers with the same five-letter first name. Take the last name of one of these singers. Switch the second and third letters. Then advance the resulting first and third letters each to the next letter in the alphabet. The result will be the last name of the other singer. What singers are these?I created an Excel spreadsheet with functions to perform the transformations. Fortunately my wife suggested I do letter transformations both ways because one of the names wasn't in my original list.
A: BILLY IDOL, BILLY JOEL
Q: Name a famous person (8,4). The last name is a regular uncapitalized word with a single vowel. Change that vowel to make a new word that is humorously defined by the person's first name. Who is it?I was going round and round on this one for awhile
A: WOLFGANG PUCK --> WOLF GANG = PACK
Q: Name a form of musical composition. If you say the word quickly, you'll name something, in two words, that you might buy in a music store. What is it?I doubt many of these are sold.
A: RHAPSODY --> RAP CD
Q: Take the name of a major American city. Move one of its letters three spaces later in the alphabet. Embedded in the resulting string of letters, reading left to right, is a cardinal number. Remove that number, and the remaining letters, reading left to right, spell an ordinal number. What city is it, and what are the numbers?It's not the first time Will has used this city, nor the second.
A: FORT WORTH --> FOURTH, TWO
Q: Take the name of an island. Shift the first letter two later in the alphabet (e.g. A would become C). Read the result backwards and you'll have the name of another island. What are the two islands?While waiting to see if we'll have an NPR Puzzle this week, I thought I'd post a fill-in puzzle. Please don't post the answer until after the standard Thursday 3PM ET deadline. But feel free to hint at the answer.
A: GUAM --> MAUIInterestingly, the Mariana Islands have GUAM to the south and the MAUG Islands to the north.
Q: Think of something that gets people moving vertically. Remove the middle two letters, and you get something that moves people horizontally. What two things are these?Rearrange the letters in the second thing and you get a place where you'll see people moving in all sorts of directions.
A: TRAMPOLINE --> TRAMLINE
Q: Think of a common Britishism — a word that the British use that's not common in the U.S. Write it in all capital letters. Turn it upside-down (that is, rotate it 180 degrees). The result is a famous hero of books and movies. Who is it?I fell for the initial trap.
A: LOO --> 007 (James Bond)
Q: Think of the word for a competitor in a particular Olympic sport. It's a compound word with a hyphen in the middle. Remove the hyphen. What remains are two words from a different Olympic sport. What words are these?Don't get distracted by the animated pictograms for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
A: SHOT-PUTTER --> SHOT, PUTTER (Golf)
